Robertson's tardy revelation does him little credit

Six years ago, one of Sydney's more notorious property developers, Michael McGurk, offered the then head of Unions NSW, John Robertson, a bribe. It was a hefty bribe, about $3 million, which Robertson immediately rejected. He did not think to alert the police that a man with a reputation as a stand-over merchant had tried to subvert the sale of a multimillion-dollar property owned by Unions NSW.

The Crimes Act is not kind to silence after serious attempted bribery. Section 3.16 states that it is an offence to have knowledge of such an improper offer and fail ''to bring that information to the attention of a member of the police force or other appropriate authority''.

NSW opposition leader John Robertson defends himself, maintaining he acted properly in rejecting a $3 million bribe from the late Michael Mcgurk over the sale of Currawong.

Robertson remained silent about the matter when the sale of the property on Pittwater, known as Currawong, became embroiled in controversy. He also neglected to make public that he had business ties to the person he had hired to conduct the sale of Currawong, David Tanevski, who was a close associate of the scandal-prone Labor powerbroker Joe Tripodi. He continued to remain silent even after he was named in a Herald story on March 22, 2011, which began: ''Another scandal has swamped the state government with a senior public servant referred to the corruption watchdog over a $12 million land deal involving a developer with links to senior ministers, including the transport minister, John Robertson''.

Having moved from Unions NSW to the state ministry, Robertson continued his silence after the head of the Premier's Department, Brendan O'Reilly, contacted the Independent Commission Against Corruption with his concerns about the sale of Currawong by the head of the Land and Property Management Authority, Warwick Watkins, for $12.2 million. The purchase should not have taken place when the government had gone into caretaker mode.

Robertson still remained silent when ICAC subsequently held public hearings into the Currawong purchase. He was still silent when ICAC conducted Operation Napier into the sale. He remained silent, still, after ICAC found the sale had been facilitated by an improperly backdated document which enabled then planning minister Tony Kelly to complete the sale as one of the last acts of the Labor government. Watkins now faces criminal charges for allegedly fabricating the document that enabled the sale.

Six years of silence about a $3 million bribe from a stand-over man was finally broken at the weekend when The Daily Telegraph published details about meetings between Robertson and McGurk over the sale of Currawong. On Monday, Attorney-General Greg Smith issued a statement saying he would write to ICAC drawing its attention to the failure to notify police of the bribe.

Robertson maintains he had acted properly in rejecting the bribe, and neither sought nor received any personal gain from the sale of Currawong. As to why he did not report the bribe, he said it ''bore no relationship whatsoever'' to ICAC's subsequent investigation of the sale process. But this was a sale in which one of the developers who bought the land, and then flipped it to the Labor government - making a quick and tidy $1.2 million profit in the process - was Allen Linz, who had an unrelated business relationship with Robertson and was a significant donor to the Labor Party. Linz was also in business with Tanevski, the man Robertson appointed to sell Currawong.

The impact of all this is that the credibility of the Opposition Leader is terminally degraded on matters of transparency and accountability. His judgment has been lamentable. His silence has been revealing. His rationalisations are implausible. His failure even to acknowledge the shortcomings of his actions, let alone express regret for them, leaves him as a toothless inquisitor in Parliament on matters of probity, leading a depleted opposition.

Robertson's leadership has been damaged but, by general accounts, nobody else wants the job, given the low ebb of Labor's fortunes in NSW. His continuance as Opposition Leader thus looks like a holding operation while Labor awaits a time when its fortunes in NSW are not so grim and its leader not so obviously a stopgap.